Around Town: Olympic Volleyball, Iraq, St. Paul’s Advocacy, Mere Christianity …

On July 7th, 2016 kindly we ask everyone to come together with their candles and flowers to support one another and to commemorate the innocent lives lost to the horrendous attack in Iraq as well as throughout the globe.

This is the St. Paul’s Advocacy Centre in the West End.

I love to see churches working for the good of people in their community. This story comes from Ellen Silvergieter, director of St. Paul’s Advocacy Office, (operated by St. Paul’s Anglican Church) in the heart of the West End:

We had a senior, Pauline, who came in to see us because the apartment she had lived in for 25 years [in Kitsilano] was undergoing a total renovation and everyone was getting an eviction notice.

She visited the St. Paul’s advocacy office on behalf of herself and several other tenants who had lived there for 15 to 30 years. She came to us to confirm a relatively new city bylaw which requires that landlords doing total renovations must abide by strict regulations regarding the number of months notice they must give to tenants. The amount of notice given increases quite substantially for tenants that have lived in one place for a long time.

After consulting with one of our tenancy experts it was determined that Pauline was entitled to six months notice as was anyone that had been there for 20 years or more. The landlord had only offered them three months notice. She decided to try along with the other tenants to talk to the landlord on their own; I am glad to report that the landlord was compliant and they all got their six months. Enough time for them to be able to locate suitable housing.  

This report appeared on the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster website June 28.

St. Paul’s Advocacy Office describes its work in this way:

The Advocacy Office offers services of information and support to persons experiencing difficulties in day-to-day living. These issues include accommodation needs, landlord-tenant disputes, health and disability issues, and access to social benefits and other government services.

It is a free service that St. Paul’s offers as part of its ministry to the community at large.

George Marsden: Mere Christianity

George Marsden has just completed a book on C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity for Princeton University Press.

A lecture by George Marsden would be worth attending no matter what the topic. As Grant Wacker says in The Historian’s Historian in the current issue of Books & Culture:

On the Mount Rushmore of living American religious historians, four people hold a secure place: Martin Marty, Mark Noll and George Marsden. (Borrowing a line from Marty, I haven’t decided on the fourth one yet.) . . . Marsden has been a mentor through his example of rigorous research, soaring imagination, courage to stand by his convictions and humane collegiality in an academic world not known for an excess of humane collegiality.

Thus a lecture by George Marsden on C.S. Lewis is, surely, something not to be missed. As it happens, that is exactly what we will be offered, next Tuesday (July 12) at Regent College, when Marsden addresses The Genius of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Here is Regent’s description of the evening:

Since 2001 Mere Christianity has sold over three and a half million copies in English alone. What accounts for the lasting vitality of this volume? This lecture will recount the unusual origins of this remarkable book and reflect on why, in contrast with the vast majority of books, its popularity has increased rather than declined. The lecture will be drawn from professor Marsden’s new study, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography (in the Princeton University Press series “The Lives of Great Religious Books”).

I certainly hope to be there.